Red, it does have a motor. The timing of the flapping is controlled by his arm movements, but it’s supplemented with a motor.
Offering the observations I can make out of my own experience in computer graphics, animation, and filmmaking, this could certainly have been faked via clever editing and use of cranes and wires. I don’t believe, however, that there is any computer animation or greenscreening or visual effects happening here. Further, it strongly appears to me that the different views were all captured at the same time, as the motion of the camera on the helmet exactly matches the wing flapping we see from the ground. Further, the website http://www.humanbirdwings.net/project-timeline/ shows a clear progression of the project, which suggests if it’s a hoax it’s an elaborate one. Personally, I believe this is real. Further, I look forward to trying out a pair of these someday. In that light, I’m going to the gym to do some chest and shoulder exercises.

I’m not enough of an expert of airflow to comment authoritatively, but I can definitely express my skepticism about the energy balance challenges associated with an ascent. The amount of extra power being delivered by the relatively slow flapping motion can’t be within an order of magnitude of the power required to suspend an adult human’s mass. I’m definitely in the camp of “Assuming it’s real, the flapping is purely theatrical, and the wind would lift the wings just as effectively in a static configuration”. Still looks fun!

Reichert said he was absolutely certain the video was a hoax. Leaving aside the issue of takeoff speed, he said that he had calculated that the stresses of flight would subject Smeets’ craft to a load “effectively the equivalent of a 20,000-pound elephant sitting on the small aluminum linkages. Unfortunately, the mechanism is simply not powerful enough, or robust enough to withstand the flight loads.”

This is clearly a sham. Leonardo (Mary Magdalene’s first lover) tried this a millennium ago and it didn’t work. Something about flying too close to the sun during a sunspot cycle. Even a genius can be a fool. Galileo had warned him. And that while being tortured by Cardinal Bellarmine with incessant round-the-water-clock readings from Genesis.

Though Leonardo’s computer graphics were much better. He put out his hand and touched the face of God, having slipped the surly bonds of Earth. Crashed into Cape Cod and grabbed a return ticket with St. Brendan the Navigator and Leif Erickson.

It pays to have studied history. You cannot be fooled.

And does anyone think that “Jarno smeets” is a noun-verb phrase from Jabberwocky?

You know, I’m beginning to think Bill Buckley was right. Drugs should be legalised. Bill was always right. Especially when he called Gore Vidal a goddam queer.

** Korean names can be really, really embarrassing. It is possible for a Korean to be named “Noh Rae Mi” or “Whang Mi Dong” or “Oh Jae Kil.” When I first heard of Lee Bum Suk, I asked a Korean colleague to pronounce it for me, thinking that perhaps it didn’t sound as bad as it looked. Nope, the spelling is perfectly phonetic. “Lee Bum Suk” is pronounced “Lee Bum Suk.” To make things worse, as if they could be worse, “Bum Suk” translates as “huge and hard.” I apologize to Koreans — a charming, hospitable and enterprising people, in my considerable experience — for pointing these things out. I hope “Derbyshire” sounds like something really hilarious or disgusting in Korean.

A lot of people ask me about my surname. There’s an interesting story behind it.

It doesn’t go back very far, actually. Because there’s no aristocracy in the US, people like to pretend that they’re descended from the nobility in Europe. (In actual practice, for most of them if they actually had an honest crest at all, it would bear the bar sinister!)

Not me. My ancestry is Dutch (Frisian) and I come from a long line of farmers and pirates. My ancestry is strictly common, and historically the commoners in Frisia didn’t have surnames. Only the nobles had surnames; the rest of us were named things like “Johann with the twisted lip” or “Blue-eyed Hans”.

Until, that is, the French invaded the place and ran it during the Napoleonic wars for about 7 years. Now Napoleon was really big on taxing the provinces so he could keep the taxes back in France low. The countries he conquered all had to pony up bigtime to pay him for the privilege of having been conquered by him. So the French called everyone in the Netherlands in and required them to pick surnames, I assume so that an accurate census could be made, so that they could tax the place better.

Well! Surnames for commoners! What a stupid idea! And it’s these silly French invaders making us do this. They’ve got all the guns, but they can’t make us take it seriously, now can they?

So a bunch of the people made up facetious or otherwise strange names. What they didn’t expect was that after the war, when the French were kicked back out again, that the Dutch government would keep those names for everyone.

There are a number of people living in the Netherlands whose surname is Poepjes, which translated into English means “little pieces of shit”.

My paternal ancestor was also a smartass, but at least he had better taste. My surname means “The Best” in not only Dutch but also in several Scandanavian languages which are in the Germanic group.

Basic physics tells you the video has to be fake. Birds can fly only because they have small bodies and relatively huge muscles powering their wings. Human beings don’t have anywhere near the amount of muscle in their arms that would be required to fly this way.

Human powered flight is indeed possible, but it requires both high-tech engineering and the use of the much stronger leg muscles. Even then it is exhausting! Arm powered flapping flight is just never going to happen.

@meh: since we’re talking about unfortunate names, here’s my favorite: when I was a military instructor, I taught a class full of Navy personnel, one of whose last names was “Soileau,” pronounced “swallow.” Thus, the correct way to address him was, “Seaman Soileau.”